The Little Engine That Could

Today is Thursday and the weekend couldn't come any sooner. Although I am really enjoying myself with my new surroundings and my teaching job, for some reason N8 and I have been really tired lately. I think it is due to all of the adjusting we've been doing. We are finally getting used to our neighborhood, and we are getting around better, our mental maps don't always agree but we go on little walking adventures now and then. We do a lot of shopping because that feels familiar and we also still need a butt-load of things for the apartment. We have yet to get pots and pans, plate/bowls/silverware, and food. N8's school is finishing up a contract with a prior English teacher and all of her household stuff will be moved into our apartment, hopefully by tomorrow. We still don't have a detailed list of things that will be given to us, so we are trying to hold off from buying more things for our place since we just might get it for FREE! Since we cannot cook in our apartment, we are FORCED to go out to eat every night. It is pretty delicious, for the most part, and if you know your way around then you can find very cheap meals. Since N8 and I have been wandering around we have made some mistakes on food choices, like the time we wanted to order "something small" to split, it ended up costing us $14 for a 5 skewer plate of ketchup covered seafood. not nice.
Picture Left: A carpet of hot red peppers laid out to dry in the sun, you can find these all over the sidewalks every day.
Picture Middle: Our dinner of Korean BBQ that we LOVE. The restaurant owner loves us too.
Picture Right: Nathan at a child's computer game set outside on the sidewalk.

While we are on the topic of bad food, Here is a little story about seafood :

The other day N8 and I realized that our sink has the wrong size pipe under our sink, it fell out completely from the bottom of the sink and from the wall. So we walked around the building until we found a middle aged woman and an older woman, we'll call her Edna, to show our pipe to and gestured that we needed help. They went upstairs and Edna brought down the manager's phone number. We gave our deepest thank-yous and tried to explain that we were going to a public phone to call. She insisted on speaking Korean to us for about 5 or 7 mins, almost yelling so we just walked away to call my co-teacher to have her call the manager's number. When we walked back to our apartment, the manager was there to look at our bathroom, he ended up taping the pipe back to the sink and told us he'd be back on Monday with a new part. A few minutes later, Edna strolled into our unlocked apartment and started talking....again. As she spoke she walked around our apartment opening up our refrigerator, our cabinets, looked in our bathroom and all of our rooms...and so on. She kept talking/yelling/ranting/ slapping my arm and we just stood there smiling after many attempts to explain that we don't speak Korean. Thankfully it only lasted 10 or so minutes. Come Sunday morning, the next day, N8 and I wake up to someone knocking feverishly on our door and relentless door-bell pushing. Finally N8 opens the door and Edna is standing there with a black plastic bag and shoves it in his face. She tried to come in but N8 blocked her and shut the door after many thanks. Later, when we finally woke up we took a look into the black bag. There was a rather large container of homemade kimchi, which smelled like a rotting foot, and a bag of 4 or 5 whole-raw fish, with the head, scales and all. We had to get rid of it, and our apartment still smells like it! We had one more encounter with Edna when the cable guy came around, the door was open and she walked in with her two grandchildren and did the same scanning routine. Now every time we hear the pitter-patter of little sandals we rush around turning off the lights and muting the TV and hide in hopes that Edna will pass like bad gas.

I hope you liked our story. We are planning on going out of town up north to visit a friend from orientation so we will be Edna FREE this weekend, so cheers to that!